"BREAST FORWARD !"
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sia,—In your Editorial announcement, preliminary to the institution of life-membership in the Spectator, you wisely excluded the members from even the semblance of tribunician functions. But did it occur to you that the time might come when you should have to repel an attack of cacathes scribendi on your columns by the adherents whom you had admitted into your camp ? I do not know. Haply (and, if so, happily) you have laid in a bounteous supply of munitions in the form of Editorial regret-slips. You need not fear, however, that I shall aspire to head such an insurrection ; yet I will now ven- ture to explain my own motives for being among the first to enrol—actually, I believe, the immediate follower of that telepathic reader In far-off Rhodesia who anticipated your scheme before it emanated from your own mind. I, indeed, skirmished in the Spectator's columns long ago, when the journal was under the direction of the late R. H. Hutton.
More recently, during the Great War, you tolerated my limerick about the aviator :-
" Who gloried to drop on a traitor ;
When they asked how he knew
Who was false, who was true ? He replied, ' I peruse the Spectator.' "
Since then I occasionally enjoy the hospitality of your correspondence columns, and when the opportunity came of allying myself more intimately with the journal which is conspicuous for its high integrity of aim, its scholarly versatility and its tolerance of " the other side," verily I jumped at the 3ffer ; and, from being a mere free library reader, became a loyal acolyte, waving the incense of my pre-paid copy of the Spectator in the faces of all those holiday-makers who take daily excursions on the waters of the Solent aboard the same steamers as myself.
Like Browning's Asolando, "May you never turn your back, but march breast forward."—I am, Sir, &c., THOMAS CARL
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